Phish launched the second set of its summer tour opener at the Cricket Pavilion in Phoenix July 7 with the agile rocker “Birds of a Feather.” The twentysomethings in the aisles looked thrilled, twirling and bouncing along to the song’s opening chords. And, just like the old days, someone next…

StarTime International, the nascent one-man label, sits in the heart of a lo-fi cultural revolution, namely the parade of swaggering, throwback rockers and skinny-tie, ripped-fishnet fashion plates crawling these days out of Brooklyn and into parts unknown. Two years ago, Isaac Green’s creation signed the Walkmen and French Kicks, easily…

I was listening to Neil Young’s 1983 album Trans before I wrote this column. Arguably one of the strangest albums made by a pop artist of Young’s stature, the album features six songs recorded with the now-antiquated synthesizers of the day and vocals filtered through a vocoder to sound like…

Kellen Fortier amuses his Where Eagles Dare bandmates. While the other four members of the Valley punk band lounge at Coffee Plantation in Tempe, Fortier, their guitarist, excuses himself to quench a growing thirst. He returns with a neon sensation. The bizarre concoction doesn’t go unnoticed. “He’s got a purple…

Phish begin their first summer tour in three years here in Phoenix, giving the locals an opportunity to witness what may prove to be a positive resurrection of the 90s most dynamic live band, which in its prime could turn an amphitheatre into a glowing bolt of aural lightning. It…

I can’t blame the bands that have skipped town or gone into hibernation for the summer. Hell, I have to carry a bottle of water with me just to drive down the block, and that’s with the air-conditioning blasting. In the local lexicon, I suppose that makes me a pussy…

Willie Nelson turned 70-years-old this past April 30. Seems like Willie’s been an old, grizzled cowboy staring down the apocalypse for at least 35 years — “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and “Help Me Make it Through the Night” were not young-man music — but he’s officially old now,…

Mississippi: The Album contains some of the funniest swearing ever committed to tape on a hip-hop record. When David Banner of the duo Crooked Lettaz cusses on his solo debut, it’s purposeful and ugly. When he says “bitch ass nigga,” a frequent insult, the delivery is so over the top,…

Adam Panic found there was a better way to scrounge up lunch money than his boring drug store job. He recorded a full-length album at his home last November, titled it The Vamp, and set out for Chapparal High School in Scottsdale, which he attends. “I’d go to school, and…

Retro’s been a fad for so long now that it, too, seems almost retro. But cool will always be cool, and Marco Polo Saldana, who sings and plays standup bass for local “psychobilly” band the Curse of the Pink Hearse, knows cool. He carries cool with him in an old…

In 1988, Metallica made an album called … And Justice for All, and it was extraordinary, filled with layered lead-guitar harmonies, whipsaw chord changes, near-orchestral structures and focused ferocity. It was, quite simply, one of the greatest metal albums ever made, despite terribly thin production. The songs, the ambition and…

Undeterred by four years of music business grief and languishing sales, incendiary rockers Supersuckers have named their new record Motherfuckers Be Trippin’. “As if we didn’t have enough hurdles putting this record out on our own. We had to put up this one,” remarks Eddie Spaghetti, the band’s proverbially good-natured…

Radiohead have mastered the prog-rock singer-songwriter album — finally. Hail to the Thief, the British band’s latest, is at once an intense personal statement by bandleader Thom Yorke and a celestial dose of guitar heroics, blips, echoes, rattles, moans and other distortions. But the new album also matches mood with…

“I wasn’t planning on doing this. It was just something I did out of necessity, and then it just kind of turned into my life.” Larry Elyea, veteran musician and guitarist for the hard-core metal band Gift, is the most sought after hard-rock producer in the Valley. He estimates he…

The atmosphere at O’Mallys on a late spring Tuesday night is pumped. The west Phoenix nightspot, an odd mix of sports bar, swank lounge and dance club, is an urban hip-hop magnet. Especially this night, when an amateur freestyle rap battle has drawn a triple-digit audience. Up-and-coming rhyming hopefuls throw…

A ballet rehearsal space seems an unlikely rock venue, but for more than 200 bored kids in Mesa last week, Jeanne’s Dance Studio filled the bill. The crowd turned out on May 24 for the third installment of a growing East Valley guitar pop festival known as Americopa Mantle. Eight…

Idlewild formed in an era when rockin’ in the U.K. was as close to trendy as it’s been in recent memory. “We came up in 1995 and 1996. Everything was Oasis and Blur,” says Roddy Woomble, lead singer of the band, a five-piece from Edinburgh, Scotland, whose new album The…

Robin Wilson and Scott Johnson walk into Restaurant Mexico in Tempe on a Wednesday afternoon. They look tired. Johnson has just come from his 13-year-old daughter’s orthodontist’s appointment and can’t stay long; there’s a laundry list of other chores to perform. Wilson is itching to resume work on a solo…

About 15 minutes into their set at the new Marquee Theatre in Tempe last Tuesday, Idaho guitar ambassadors Built to Spill blasted into “The Plan,” a bombastic, subtly melodic rocker. As 700 fans or so looked on, lead singer and ax man Doug Martsch sang the lyric, “The plan means…

Mike “Sir Pie” Gomez, the normally effusive rapper and singer for Cousins of the Wize, looks devastated, wearing a blank look of disbelief, like he’s lost his security blanket. In fact, he has. Days earlier, his Cousins rhyming partner and longtime friend Chris “CPT” Pangrazi, 29, had been killed in…

Okay, no surprise here: The rush-released American Idol Season 2: All-Time Classic American Love Songs, one of the worst albums in recent memory, debuted earlier this month at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. There’s plenty to scoff at here, from the laughably heart-stricken rendition of Journey’s “Open…

In “The Driveby,” one of several side-splitting skits on storied hip-hop producer Prince Paul’s clever new concept album Politics of the Business, Paul finds himself confronted on the street by a hyper, exasperated fan. “I did the worm, man. I used to break-dance, man. I fuckin’ popped, locked and rocked,…